Prada Announces Koolhaas-Designed Prada Transformer

The Prada Foundation has announced its collaboration with OMS/Rem Koolhaas, who will design a structure to host a curated series of interdisciplinary projects in Seoul, Korea. The Prada Transformer will open on April 25th with "Waist Down: Skirts By Miuccia Prada," a career-spanning exhibition of the designer's skirts. In June, the Transformer will become a theater; a series of films selected by Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu will run throughout the month. Beyond Control, Italian curator and critic Germano Celant's picks from the Prada Foundation's collection opens July 30th. Special events and other cultural activities are promised; details will be announced closer to the opening date.

Situated next to the 16th-Century Gyeonghui Palace, Koolhaas's design combines the four sides of a tetrahedron—hexagon, cross, rectangle, and circle—into one open-air pavilion. Following architect Zaha Hadid's Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, the Prada Transformer represents a growing interest in temporary or "pop-up" structures whose experimental designs by celebrity architects lend a sense of exclusivity to the projects hosted therein.

First launched at the Venice Biennale during the summer, Chanel paid $400,000 to New York City in order to host Hadid's pavilion at Central Park's Rumsey Playfield in October 2008. Open to the pibluc, New Yorkers clamored to see its amorphous interior, which was filled with a rotating series of exhibitions. Critics have derided such experimental, high-budget projects as superfluous given the global economic outlook.

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